Shaping Inuit Policy: The Minutes of the Eskimo Affairs Committee

During the critical decade of the 1950s, Canada’s federal government identified the northern territories as an object of policy meriting systematic attention. With the deepening of Cold War tensions the region assumed greater strategic and defence significance, renewing concerns about continental defence and Canadian sovereignty. At the same time, a growing awareness of social forces within the North generated changes that called for a state response. The economic pressures within the Indigenous hunting and trapping economy inflicted considerable hardship on most residents, while the advance of southern Canadian industrial interests into the North obliged the state to assume new regulatory and promotional roles. In responding to these drivers, Ottawa faced a complicated field of administrative jurisdictions, ecologies and social structures scattered across the largest land mass in the nation.